[Coco] Fest Weekend

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 05 April 2007, James Hrubik wrote:
>Ah, memories.  Back in '77-'80, when I was teaching in Beauval SK, we
>went one whole month when the temperature didn't get above -35C.
>Humidity is everything, though.  Got back here to Ohio, and the same
>down coat that kept me warm in the bush could not keep me warm at
>0F.  Dry cold is much easier to take than this lake effect stuff.
>The place I would NOT want to be would be the east side of Lake
>Michigan or Lake Huron, or UP Michigan.
>
>Gene, up there in the bush, the guys would get their dozers running
>(diesels) by building a fire under the oil pan.

I've seen that done in western Nebraska, except they'd use a propane 
heater.  I was stuck and they needed to get a Minneapolis 8000 going to 
pull me out, plugging in the block heater for an hour wasn't enough, so 
out came the same propane fired heater they used under a 100 gallon 
kettle for brewing something else in the summertime.  It took that 
running with a flame about a foot high & a 100 lb bottle getting very 
very cold & puny, and some pretty big battery chargers before it fired 
up.  Once it took, it never looked back, other than to see how far off 
the ground nearly 100 foot of 1/2" log chain was by the time it snapped 
me out of the hole I'd dug.  I'd made a mistake, trying to drive across 
heavily crusted snow that did not have any grass sticking out of it.  
When I broke the crust, I was instantly sitting on the body with the 
wheels spinning free.  Old Ford F250, 4wd, heavy utility box, it scaled 
the way it was loaded at about 10k pounds.  That Minneapolis had its work 
cut out for it.  It would have pulled in the 15 or 18k class at a tractor 
pull.  That length of chain was to get it out on bare dirt for traction.  
I was in the middle of an open field gate, but the gate was down in a 
swale about 3 feet deep.  One of my lessons learned early in the 
broadcast engineering game 40+ years ago...

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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